Aegisthus is a figure in Greek mythology. He is
Orestes and
Iphigeneia’s stepfather, and he appears in
Homer’s
Odyssey,
Aeschylus’s
Oresteia, and
Sophocles’s
Electra. As the story goes, Aegisthus is killed by Orestes as an act of revenge after Aegisthus works with Orestes’s mother, Clytemnestra, to kill Orestes’s father, Agamemnon.
Aristotle briefly mentions Aegisthus to illustrate the violence involved in
tragedy.